Saturday, 18 February 2017

Back in November I marked a literature review from an MA candidate. This was a short, not terribly important practice exercise for the real thing and carried only a small percentage of the total marks for the module. I could make no sense of it and gave it 0%. A colleague suggested this might be too crushing for a first assignment: could I not whack it up to 10%? I suppose the candidate had sat down and at least tried to organise the material, however inappropriately, so I agreed. Here is a sample of her style:

Natural order hypothesis is imperfect because of methodological consideration. In my point of view, lack of collegiality and the personal nature of suffered via the years are noticeable and prove that there is something close than the traditional argue with to the leader. The grammar was the basic knowledge of the language. There are six factors to decide whether the theory is right or not suitable. He scored more because of his clarity and simplicity in the tongue. This method is extremely susceptible on the grounds of scientific insufficiency. It is recycled theory ideas. The second language acquisition theory is more delegate of the intuition and personal understanding of pre-systematic times.

The writer continues in the same vein for another 950 words or so. English is not her mother tongue, but that doesn't seem to me to be the problem. The language is eccentric but not wildly inaccurate. Vocabulary choice is a bit off sometimes, the writer hitting upon the next word along rather than the one she's aiming for, but individual sentences are mostly well-formed. Trouble is, they seem only vaguely connected to one another. The real problem is that she doesn't know what she's talking about and is simply flanneling. Readers cannot be expected to pore over essays for hours, attempting to construe what writers may or may not be trying to say, so sod it, give it zero. Oh, OK then, if you insist, give it ten.

Critical thinking and critique in new materialist perspectives is all without and diffractive: POST/modern/structural/human/humusist/anthropocene and PANpsychic/semiotic. They are therefore nondebunking and deauthorized immanent critique practices as the/an art of formal negation, curating and dosage opening for new and clinical practices, and quality is seen as tendencies at the origin of forces regardless of the complex that derives from them. They are working/s and writing/s with and beyond the subject: Inner outer always eroding but creative dimensions of life only relationally super-, supra-positioned until something comes to matter, makes happen, and/or decision making. Learning, action, and change beyond assumptions and post-accountability thus fiction as method and school of thought: Method is/as a bridge to philosophy and here my profession entrance. I call it material eco/edu/criticism. It is of a minor type. It is a bi/lingual criticism beyond representation, stumbling between major neoliberal and minor mine languages as in major and minor literatures (Deleuze, 1986) “restoring life to primary life” (p. 108). I ultimately argue for applying philosophy and inter-intrasemiotic thinking to foster and build educational cultures of innovation conceptually, methodologically, and theoretically, social innovation and social enterprise.

That is the first paragraph of a peer-reviewed article. I didn't manage to read it through, so I can only tell you that in the two paragraphs that dribble on from this one, the writer makes my MA candidate's effort look like an essay by Bertrand Russell. This woman's peers actually read it and actuallyapproved it for publication. 'This is good stuff,' they must've said. 'Maybe a tad too cohesive: take a few verbs out, drop a few subject pronouns, maybe muddy the relationship between thoughts here and there to reduce the coherence factor a tad and it'll be right as ninepence.' And there it is: a grey wall of poker-faced drivel, seriously offered up for our serious consideration.So maybe I was too harsh on my MA candidate's mini lit review. Should I encourage her to submit it to the ELTJ? *****Next up for the MA group is the dissertation proposal. To prepare them for this, I gave them two proposals from previous years, names and other identifying features removed. One of the proposals was carefully thought out and excellently presented, and the other was umm... neither of those things. The writer kept repeating the same small set of threadbare ideas, and kept referring to whiteboards and board pens as 'teaching methods', which pissed me off big time. The candidates were given a set of assessment criteria, read both proposals, then in groups assessed away.I suppose people who are themselves being continually assessed are often disposed to evaluate their peers' work harshly: they set out with a kind of 'gotcha' mentality. It was dismaying, as I circulated, to hear them shitting all over the first proposal (the good one) and then bigging up the crummy one on the reasonable assumption that I must have chosen a good one and a bad one and then probably given them the bad one first.So yeah. Maybe that peer reviewed article is actually a model of clarity and it's just my prejudices getting in the way.*****Pour faire un poème dadaïstePrenez un journal Prenez des ciseaux Choisissez dans ce journal un article ayant la longueur que vous comptez donner à votre poème. Découpez l'article Découpez ensuite avec soin chacun des mots qui forment cet article et mettez-le dans un sac. Agitez doucement Sortez ensuite chaque coupure l'une après l'autre dans l'ordre où elles ont quitté le sac. Copiez consciencieusement. Le poème vous ressemblera. Et vous voilà "un écrivain infiniment original et d'une sensibilité charmante, encore qu'incomprise du vulgaire"

Tristan Tzara, 1920.

How to make a dadaist poem

Take a newspaper

Take some scissors

Choose from the newspaper an article of the length you intend your poem to be

Cut up the article

Then carefully cut out the words that make up the article and put them in a bag.

Shake gently

Next take out each cutting, one after another in the order they come out of the bag.

Copy them conscientiously.

The poem will resemble you.

And there you are: 'an infinitely original writer, of charming sensibility, though unappreciated by the vulgar herd'.

Pages

Subscribe To

Statcounter

Quite.

''When the Washington Post telephoned me on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, I felt at once that this was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual and the defence of free expression''

"Nothing optional - from homosexuality to adultery - is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate."

''The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.'

Christopher Hitchens

“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvellous universe, this tremendous﻿ range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”

Richard P. Feynman

''Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. "Introverts," writes a perceptive fellow named Thomas P. Crouser, "are driven to distraction by the semi-internal dialogue extroverts tend to conduct. Introverts don't outwardly complain, instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness." Just so.''

Jonathan Rauch

''One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallendown a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.''

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

''The human species, Dinah sometimes thinks, is stark staring mad. People have no sooner got themselves born than they start to imagine the gods want them to flatten their heads, or perforate their genitals, or arrange themselves into hierarchies based on the colour of their skins. The gods require them to avoid eating hoofs, or to walk backwards in certain sacred presences, or to hang up cats in clay pots and light fires underneath them. The gods like them to slaughter birds and make incisions in their own skulls. The gods have put the banana on this earth so that the human species can apprehend that fruit as a miraculous revelation of the Holy Trinity. It has to do with their singular ability to think and dream in symbols. This is what makes the species so vicious. It's also what makes them great poets.''

Barbara Trapido'Frankie and Stankie'.

On God

Sick of it, whatever it's called, sick of the names.I dedicate every pore to what's here.

Ikkyu1394-1481

on trying not to be an arse

On Buddhist meditation:

'Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether.'